Most cars today come with an am/fm radio tuner, cassette deck, and/or compact disk (CD) player, as standard equipment. Numerous other types of after-market car audio and video equipment are also available today, such as digital media players (e.g., mp3 players, DVD players, minidisk players), CD changers, satellite radio tuners, navigation systems, computers, and the like. The term “autosound head unit” is used broadly herein to refer to electronic devices capable of displaying audio and/or video media, and includes, without limitation each of the foregoing components either individually or in combination. As more and different autosound head unit components become available, people want the flexibility to customize and/or upgrade their existing audio equipment to take advantage of the new innovations in car audio equipment.
To a great extent, this desired flexibility is limited by the fact that many new vehicles have an OEM autosound head unit integrated with one or more other systems of the vehicle. This makes it impossible for a user to remove the factory stereo radio without losing the functionality of the other integrated system(s). For example, some vehicles combine the radio display with the display of the climate control system, navigation system, or the like.
Another factor that makes it difficult to simply replace a factory radio with an after-market autosound head unit is that the factory autosound head units of many vehicles are not of a standard shape and/or size and are integrated into a single dashboard component.
For these and other reasons, there remains a need in the art for installation kits that allow aftermarket autosound head units to be installed in vehicles, while retaining the functionality of other systems and original dashboard components of the vehicle.